> But my quarrel with the creators of the Mozart's Requiem-themed toilet
> ad -- and contemporary US culture as a whole -- is the conflation of
> all aspects of personality to produce a POV that is *relentlessly*
> vulgar. The whole notion of the "proper occasion," that there is a
> time and a place for everything, has pretty much been lost. I doubt
> that Mozart, for all his fondness for fart jokes, would really want
> listeners meditating on intestinal gas while listening to his Requiem
> -- again, one of the most sublime collection of notes ever assembled.
Well, my attitude toward this kind of thing is that you have to expect pretty much anything from ads and commercials -- the whole idea, as I understand it, is for them to get more and more ridiculous all the time, because the public is so jaded with them that they have to attract attention somehow.
The whole battle to keep classical music from being "degraded" by commercials has been lost for some time, if you consider it degrading. My attitude is that the more exposure the public gets, the better -- at least it reminds Americans that there is such a thing. But I also respect those who feel that it should be treated with reverence, as you do; I'm just more relaxed about it.
> On a less lofty but related subject, one of the reasons that I value
> my new telecommuting lifestyle -- where I very rarely have to take the
> train to a Manhattan office anymore -- has been the virtual extinction
> of coat-and-tie wearing among office workers. One of the few good
> things about working in an office was that coworkers looked dignified
> and sophisticated, like adults. Now, with the ubiquitous crummy
> shirts and slacks that are de rigueur for the "leisure" look of
> today's anything-but-leisure, 24/7 business operations, male office
> workers simply look like a corroded, old and tired version of high
> school students.
Being an at-home worker for the last 24 years or so, I rarely get a chance to see what office workers are wearing these days -- and you should see what I wear! But I definitely am shocked by what people are wearing to classical music concerts these days. Associating Wolfgang with defecation on TV is one thing (hell, everything on commercial TV is associated with defecation as far as I'm concerned), but if you're going to go to the trouble of buying a ticket and showing up in person at a concert, you should look decent, it seems to me.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax